Shelby Foote Quotes

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• People want to know why the South is so interested in the Civil War. I had maybe, it's a rough guess, about fifty fistfights in my life. Out of those fifty fistfights, the ones that I had the most vivid memory of were the ones I lost. I think that's one reason why the South remembers the war more than the North does.

  Shelby Foote

  Memories, War, Loss

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  236 Copy quote

• Before the war it was always the United States *are*, after the war it was the United States is... it made us an is.

  Shelby Foote

  War, History, United States

  109 Copy quote

• People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.

  Shelby Foote

  Thinking, Errors, People

  Interview for the Academy of Achievement, Washington, D. C., June 18, 1999.

  87 Copy quote

• The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.

  Shelby Foote

  War, Hell, Crossroads

  Shelby Foote (1995). “The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign, December 1862-July 1863”

  98 Copy quote

• If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

  Shelby Foote

  Teaching, Writing, Needs

  96 Copy quote

• A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.

  Shelby Foote

  Educational, Book, Reading

  North Carolina Libraries, Vol. 51-54, 1993.

  63 Copy quote

• When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.

  Shelby Foote

  Growing Up, Believe, Hard Times

  83 Copy quote

• The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.

  Shelby Foote

  Memories, Dust, Imagination

  Shelby Foote (2011). “The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville”, p.815, Vintage

  60 Copy quote

• As a Southerner I would have to say that one of the main importances of the War is that Southerners have a sense of defeat which none of the rest of the country has.

  Shelby Foote

  Country, War, History

  53 Copy quote

• I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value, but to have someone else to point out your mistakes is a shortcut of the process.

  Shelby Foote

  Mistake, Thinking, Shortcuts

  51 Copy quote

• A rich man's war and a poor man's fight.

  Shelby Foote

  War, Fighting, Men

  Shelby Foote (1986). “The Civil War, a Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian”, Vintage

  32 Copy quote

• I abhor the idea of a perfect world. It would bore me to tears.

  Shelby Foote

  Ideas, Perfect, Bored

  47 Copy quote

• I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.

  Shelby Foote

  Writing, Adversity, Thinking

  52 Copy quote

• A fact is not a truth until you love it.

  Shelby Foote

  Facts

  Shelby Foote, William C. Carter (1989). “Conversations with Shelby Foote”, p.248, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  28 Copy quote

• Longevity conquers scandal every time.

  Shelby Foote

  Time, Scandal, Conquer

  Shelby Foote (1992). “Jordan County: A Landscape in Narrative”, Vintage

  42 Copy quote

• Generally the first week in September brings the hottest weather of the year, and this was no exception. Overhead the fans turned slow, their paddle blades stirring the air up close to the ceiling but nowheres else.

  Shelby Foote

  Years, Weather, Air

  Shelby Foote (2011). “Follow Me Down: A Novel”, p.3, Vintage

  49 Copy quote

• But the same thing was true in the army. You slept in a barracks with all kinds of people of every nationality, every trade, every character and quality you can imagine, and that was a good experience.

  Shelby Foote

  Character, Army, People

  36 Copy quote

• North was only a direction indicated by a compass--if a man had one, that is, for otherwise there was no north or south or east or west; there was only the brooding desolation.

  Shelby Foote

  Men, East, West

  Shelby Foote (2011). “The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian”, p.128, Vintage

  31 Copy quote

• Grant was something rare in that or any war. He could learn from experience.

  Shelby Foote

  War, Learning Experience, Grants

  17 Copy quote

• I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between me and the paper.

  Shelby Foote

  Typewriters, Paper, Want

  25 Copy quote

• I've never known, at least a modern historical instance, where the truth wasn't superior to distortion in every way.

  Shelby Foote

  Historical, Way, Modern

  6 Copy quote

• I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

  Shelby Foote

  Writing, Interesting, Used

  28 Copy quote

• And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

  Shelby Foote

  War, Writing, Good Day

  7 Copy quote

• Most of my inspiration, if that's the word, came from books themselves.

  Shelby Foote

  Book, Inspiration, Ifs

  22 Copy quote

• Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.

  Shelby Foote

  Hard Work, Writing, Knowing

  17 Copy quote

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